I remember my friends and I playing army and cowboys and Indians during our recesses in grade school. The sounds of pow-pow-pow rang out from our finger pistols and our imaginary rifles. I smile today as I recall the inevitable spats of “I shot you,” and “no you didn’t,” or “yeah, but I was only wounded.”

Not one of my friends or anyone we knew or heard about grew up to be serial killers or mass murderers – unless you count serving in the various combat zones as being synonymous with same (the thoughts and perspectives of John Kerry and Jane Fonda notwithstanding).

Growing up, even the girls in my school could handle rifles. Hunting, shooting, reloading, black powder, targets in the backyard, etc., were the norm. I had a beautiful .22 pump rifle until shortly after I graduated, and I would have given anything to have my uncle’s 30.06 rifle, but that went to someone else.

We grew up with guns, and there were any number of times our idea of conflict resolution was reduced to a shout, shove, or punch, but it never came to shooting or stabbing one another or anyone else.

There were teachers we absolutely despised and probably still would today if we were to run into them, but there was never, and I mean never, a thought given to taking a gun to school to shoot them or a classmate. And many of us had our rifles in our cars so we could go hunting right from school.

War movies and Westerns were the norm then, even into our college years. But they never influenced us to the point that we assaulted the public with our readily available weapons.

The one thing we did not have growing up and through our years in school was a phalanx of doctors and psychiatrists dispensing prescriptions for psychotropic drugs like candy from Pez dispensers.

Former Reagan White House adviser and president and co-founder of the Social Security Institute Lawrence Hunter wrote in Forbes magazine: “In 2000, New York legislators recognized the ubiquitous and unambiguous connection between violence, especially gun violence and mass murder, and the widespread prescribed use of psychiatric drugs. Senate Bill 7035 was introduced in the New York State Senate that year requiring police agencies to report to the Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) on certain crimes and suicides committed by a person who is using psychiatric drugs, including assault, homicide, sex offense, robbery offense, firearms and other dangerous weapons offense, kidnapping and arson.” (“It’s The Drugs Not The Guns,” Jan. 12, 2013, Forbes.com)

Therein is the 800-pound pink gorilla in the center of the room that everyone, especially the anti-gun people, refuses to acknowledge.

In his last Facebook post before his highly suspicious death this month, John Noveske, one of America’s most celebrated battle rifle manufacturers, posted the most comprehensive list I’ve seen to date of children as young as 11 years old to adults aged 37 years who had either committed suicide or mass shootings. The one thing every one of them had in common was that they were on a prescription psychotropic drug or a combination of same such as Prozac, Zoloft, Ritalin, Luvox, Paxill, Ambien, and others.

In each case, the extreme mood swings, extreme behavior and dark places of withdrawal increased in both the children and/or adults, the earliest noted by Noveske being in 1998. Noveske’s list detailed 39 specific examples. He also listed three of four recent mass killers who were known to have taken those same medications – nothing is yet known pursuant to what exactly Adam Lanza was taking.

The television advertisements for these drugs include long and detailed potential side affects that range from violent thoughts to thoughts of suicide. And yet they are prescribed like candy.

The preamble to New York Senate Bill 7075 noted above reads, in part: “There is a large body of scientific research establishing a connection between violence and suicide and the use of psychotropic drugs in some cases. This research, which has been published in peer reviewed publications such as the American Journal of Psychiatry, and The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and The Journal of Forensic Science, has shown, among other things, that: certain drugs can induce mania (a psychosis which can produce bizarre, grandiose and highly elaborated destructive plans, including mass murder; … and certain drugs can produce an acute psychotic reaction in an individual not previously psychotic.”

Hunter continued: “Since that time, there have been at least 12 additional high-profile mass murders linked to the use of psychiatric drugs, about one a year. And [as Noveske also notes] virtually every mass school shooting during the past 15 years, the shooter has been on or in withdrawal from psychiatric drugs.”

The New York bill died in committee. And, as noted above, those taking said drugs have caused the deaths of people around the world.

But rather than take on the giant pharmaceutical companies, Obama, Sarah Brady and the anti-gun crowd blame guns for the actions of the individuals and do so in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary of their “take their guns” crusade.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media and politically correct editors, publishers and program producers chant and/or push the fallacious mantra of those who want to deprive people of their Second Amendment rights.

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